Edith Prague Keeps Going At 87 As Commissioner On Aging

HARTFORD — It isn't merely her age of 87 that makes Edith Prague's return as the state's commissioner on aging an improbable odyssey.

Twenty years ago, in an epic and public clash with Gov. Lowell P. Weicker, Prague was fired as commissioner when she refused to cut her agency's budget and merge it into a larger department during a financial crisis. She and Weicker have never spoken since.

Prague then ran for state Senate and won, serving for 18 years and quietly battling behind the scenes to re-establish the department from which she had been dismissed. When it was time to name the first commissioner two decades after her firing, Prague volunteered her own name — and she was chosen by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

Today, Prague serves as the $120,000-a-year commissioner of the newly re-created department. As the oldest commissioner in Malloy's administration and one of the oldest in the country, Prague fights for senior citizens in much the same way that she did as a state legislator.

Following her own health battles with a minor stroke on Christmas Day 2011 and then a freak accident 10 months ago in which she broke her pelvis in three places after being attacked by an unleashed dog at a local running track, Prague says she is fortunate to still be working.

"I consider myself lucky,'' Prague said in an interview in her 10th-floor office in Hartford. "This is a very deep interest of mine. The elderly population is growing by leaps and bounds, and it takes a senior to know what other seniors need.''

Prague now supervises 31 employees and an annual budget of $25 million in a department that oversees the full gamut of senior citizen issues, including Medicare, Alzheimer's disease, dementia, Meals on Wheels, health insurance counseling and home care. Although other agencies actually spend the money for high-priced programs like Medicaid for nursing homes, Prague's agency is essentially an umbrella organization and a clearinghouse to advocate for the needs of senior citizens.

As she nears her 88th birthday next month, Prague knows that she could be sitting on a beach somewhere, reading a book in retirement.

But her fiery passion for helping senior citizens causes her to commute 46 miles round-trip daily to Hartford from her longtime home in Columbia in Tolland County.

An outspoken liberal Democrat, Prague still has not lost her partisan fire when it comes to the recent federal government shutdown.

"Any senior who votes Republican in the next election needs to have his head examined,'' Prague said recently in an interview. "In all my years, I never remember such behavior in Washington. I'm certainly glad I'm not in Washington. I couldn't tolerate it.''

Battles with Republicans

As a pro-union liberal, Prague tangled in the legislature for years with Republicans, business leaders and the Connecticut Business & Industry Association over issues like mandated paid sick leave for service workers, raising the minimum wage and enacting electricity deregulation. She was a thorn in the side of Republicans at the same time that she was beloved by senior citizens.

Some of her biggest clashes came with then-Senate Republican leader Louis DeLuca, who said earlier this year that Malloy would eventually regret the day that he nominated Prague as commissioner on aging.

Although many Republican senators clashed sharply with Prague over taxes and state spending, many still had warm relations with her personally in the Senate — where her nomination as commissioner was approved, 36-0.

Former state Republican chairman Christopher Healy said that Prague should not even have a job as commissioner because the agency should have remained folded into the much-larger Department of Social Services, where it was until the new agency was re-created on July 1. He said that Prague's department is a prime example of an agency that should be eliminated to save money.

"This is just more fluff that merely pays lots of salaries and lots of bureaucrats to shuffle papers around and show up at hearings,'' Healy said. "This is the one thing that I will always admire Lowell Weicker for. Even Lowell Weicker saw it as a complete waste of time and resources. Everyone always talks about cutting waste in government, but we're not prepared to take a hard look at these peripheral agencies. There's no consolidation of effort. There's no thinning of the herd here. You've got to thin the herd so the herd survives.''

Prague remains fiery in her personal life, displaying the independent streak that has become her hallmark. She was not pleased when her adult daughters told her that she should no longer be driving to Hartford on a daily basis. That happened because Prague had an accident when she did not see a fellow motorist and hit the front end of his truck.